A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 55-minute studio album containing the overture and almost all of the incidental music that Felix Mendelssohn wrote to accompany William Shakespeare's play of the same name.

It is performed by Kathleen Battle, Frederica von Stade, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, with interlinking passages of verse spoken by Judi Dench.

In the first, released by RCA Victor Red Seal on LP in 1977 and on CD in 1985, she performed a shorter, reordered German-language version of the score with Judith Blegen and the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy.

[1] Alan Sanders reviewed the album in Gramophone in October 1994, comparing it with what he considered to be the best recording of the work to have appeared thitherto, a Teldec disc conducted by Kurt Masur.

Conducting with precision, pointedness and more fantasy than Masur had supplied, he struck "an ideal balance between conveying the underlying strength of Mendelssohn's writing and bringing out the music's wide-eyed freshness, its delicacy and its gentle, slightly teasing sense of humour".

Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was "every bit as persuasive" as Seiji Ozawa's Second Fairy as she had been when recording A Midsummer Night's Dream for Eugene Ormandy.

Judi Dench was an actress of distinction, but her contributions were unnecessarily lengthy, and Freed was alienated by "[her] intensity, [her] jarring entrances and by her pauses after each line of verse, irrespective of expressive sense".